Mark Costello - Big If

Jens ducked into the break room by the Bot Pod. Howard and Pru Powers were sitting at a formica table trying to piece together ribbons of shredded paper. Howard wore a rust tux and a ruffled shirt. Pru was breathless, sifting through the bag, describing some lawyer-looking men she had seen outside Jerzy’s private conference room. Jens took a mug from the mug hooks on the wall, found a liter bottle of Glucola in the cabinet, and filled the mug with ice.

Howard said, “How many, Pru?”

“Three, maybe four,” she said. “I forgot to count.”

“But you’re sure they’re lawyers? It’s important, Pru.”

“They looked like lawyers.”

“What kind?”

“Thick-lipped, corpulent, pugnacious — I didn’t get a good look. Prem and Digby were blocking my view.”

“What specialty , I mean. Did they look like underwriter’s counsel or a bankruptcy insertion team? Shoes are a dead giveaway. Laces mean we’re going public. Loafers mean finito. Come on, Pru, think .”

“One was in-house counsel, that midget Jaffe. The others were definitely out-house.”

“What about the shoes , you freaking retard?”

“Don’t call me a retard.”

“Don’t act like a retard.”

“Mom said no calling me a retard.”

“Zitface!”

“Loser!”

“Scumhead!”

“Non-market-savvy zitface!”

“Oh shut up!” said Howard.

Jens said, “Hey hey hey you guys. Howard, go to your suite. You too, Pru — those MIPs won’t map themselves.”

Pru said, “A MIP is a type of map, not a thing to be mapped.”

“Oh shut up,” said Jens.

The Bot Pod was a wide and pillared space with three sealed windows at the far end. In the center of the room was a bank of low, orange, armless, foamy-looking chairs, actually a Danish Modern couch in sections, several couches probably. The sections could be reconfigured as a circle for Pod-wide thinkathons, or in twos and threes for smaller project groups, or pushed together into beds when the coders pulled all-nighters. There were enough sections to make two decent beds, or one double bed, or three short ones, or a short one and a small working circle, more like a working square. Lu Ping, the engineer, and Phoebe Rosenthal, the artist, were sleeping on the couches. Jens did not disturb them. This was their honeymoon.

The walls were lined with cluttered tables and workstations. Charlie Mayer, who telecommuted from Honolulu, had by far the neatest workspace. Lu Ping, next to Mayer, was compiling a subroutine as he slept entwined around his bride. Error flags slowly filled his screen, Path/File access error, Bad file name, Bad file name, Bad record length, Bad file name, Input past end of life, Path not found .

Davey Tabor, next to Lu Ping, was on vacation, supposedly trekking Nepal. Davey called in every few days from what he said was a satellite phone, telling glowing anecdotes about monks and Sherpas and the thousand-year enlightenment, but he seemed vague on the specifics, which led some Podders to suspect that the trek was a cover story and that Davey was actually doing a round of job interviews in California.

Beltran, next to Davey, was signed out to a mental health day — the company allowed them five per annum. Bjorn Bjornsson, next to Beltran, was busy grooming his screen pets, a litter of furry whatzits, and Vaughn Naubek at the next desk was making fun of him.

Bjorn said, “At least I don’t carry pictures of Phoebe in my wallet.”

Naubek had changed out of street clothes into his working costume, a letter carrier’s summer knits, white knee socks, gray-blue shorts, a sky-blue shirt, and a U.S. Postal Service pith helmet. Naubek had taken to dressing “in character” to get himself psyched up for working on a new-series monster known as the Postal Worker. He winced at Bjorn’s comment, glanced at the couch where Phoebe slept, uttered something vile in UNIX, and went back to work.

Jens hung his coat on the rack, signed himself in on the in/out whiteboard, and sat at his terminal between Prem and Naubek. He debugged SmoShadow for the next few minutes, clearing error flags, until he got it to compile. He grabbed his mug and went up to the second floor for the weekly meeting of the Spec Committee.

Meredith Shattuck, sexless, cool, and twenty-two, was boss of everybody in the conference room, Digby from the server ring, the twins from marketing, Jaffe the attorney, the head creative, and Jens, who came in late. This was the Spec Committee, BigIf’s politburo of design, where system problems were hashed out, new product lines discussed, asses kissed and paddled, egos fluffed and crushed. Meredith presided in her heavy horn-rims and her pearl-gray Nehru suit, buttoned to her tiny, pointed chin. The suit made her look less Indian than Maoist, a Maoist from Connecticut, Miss Porter’s School, and Harvard, where she had spent, she always said, the best semester of her life, leaving at eighteen to join and finally run the largest war game on the Web. Her hair was short and glossy brown, barbered carefully, hair by hair it seemed, and she listened to everything — the head creative ranting, mad schemes from the twins, Jaffe’s dense and verbless legalese — with the same expression of polite engagement, one hand on the blondwood conference table, one hand in her tailored lap, a Connecticut Confucian, a Communist entrepreneur, a woman trapped inside the body of a woman.

“Smoke?” she said to Jens. “Are we actually talking about smoke ?”

“No,” said Jens, “smoke shadows .”

The topic wasn’t actually smoke or shadows, but rather Jens’ modest (so he thought) proposal to upgrade the blackened crater, the game’s Cartesian 0, 0, 0 and universal starting point. Jens, knowing that he would be on the crush-and-paddle list for not completing Monster Todd, had planned to unveil SmoShadow as cover and excuse for his delays on the new monster bot. Jens made his pitch. The smoke pouring from the crater, as presently configured, didn’t cast a shadow — a nit, perhaps, Jens said, but why not do it right?

Digby leapt in before Jens could finish. Digby pointed out that they already had shadows in the crater, moving with the sun, a phasing crater lip of gloom, adjusted for the weather, the goddamn fucking weather, Digby said, clouds and partial clouds and toxic clouds, plus other local-object shadows, helper bots and human, holybots and monsters, and all of these had to be splined and tessellated by the angle engines, giant loads of memory and throughput, batching plots to render engines, which colored plots and shaded them, laying texture maps (sand, shale, stucco wall), and turned the colors down to create a hazy fading in the distance, rounding objects in the foreground by wrapping darkness around “curves,” eight or nine subrenderings, Digby pointed out, Z-sorting and MIP mapping, alpha-blending, P-correction — all of this to produce a weak 3-D illusion, forget about the loads of movement, aping movement, saving movement, everybody’s moving and the game is about movement, we’re heading west to destiny, and then you’ve got preloaded sprite routines, the mo-capture files, and the new full-polygon monsters, and all of this remembering and math-on-the-fly was carefully divided between the servers and the user’s at-home RAM and vid cards, dual-ported, double-buffered, co-co-co-co-processed, and even so, Digby said, they were barely hitting three frames a second in the lulls, and now you want to enhance the smoke ?

“No,” Jens said, “the shadows. The smoke is fine, it’s wonderful. I’m talking about shadows.”